Humanisme

Man is the measure of everything, those who are because they exist and those who aren't because they don't exist wrote Protagoras, five centuries before Jesus Christ was born. Since then, several philosophers look to reflect on this  ambiguous phrase.  Since Plato and Aristotle, God and not Man is the measure of everything. In the 18th century, for all the philosophers part of the philosophical movement of the Enlightenment all knowledge was related to human experience and its fundamental postulates. The Freemasons adhere more easily to this second explanation because they work for the improvement, intellectual or social, of the Humanity and for the amelioration - material or moral - of the Humanity. This priority is found in every Obedience, either those who work for the Glory of the Grand Architect of the Universe or not. André Comte-Sponville gives an excellent definition of this in its Une éducation philosofique, published by the Presses Universitaires de France, when he reflects on the humanism of freemasonry: "let us prevent from making Man dream, let us prevent from turning humanism into a kind of religion; this is no more than a recurrent narcisism. Man is only great in the perception he has of its miseries. He is human in the condition that he gave up of divinity. Man is no master or owner of nature, and if humanism is a derivation of ecologisme he will not be able to explain the disdain on the environment or on the other animals. Nature is not God, Man is not God; he is not  definitely God  and this is the point why Man is in charge of itself, of nature and the spiritual".